Editorial: Indy needs long-term strategy for hiring more police

Indianapolis needs to hire an additional 685 officers to reach the national average for police staffing.

On the complex, politically charged issue of how to confront violent crime in Indianapolis, there is finally consensus on one important point: The city's police department is dramatically understaffed.

That fact should be seen as simply unacceptable by political and public safety leaders and by residents in a city where crime rates are much too high and where two officers have been shot, one fatally, in recent days.

As The Star's Tony Cook reported in the wake of the shooting death of Officer Rod Bradway, the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department would need to hire an additional 685 officers just to reach the national average of 2.5 per 1,000 residents. Indy now deploys only 1.7 officers for every 1,000 residents.

Indy's large geographic sizespeaks to one reason more officers are needed. At 361 square miles, Indy sprawls over more land than New York City (305 square miles), even though 10 times as many people live there as here.

The fact Indy is so spread out means that response times in emergencies tend to be longer, especially with too few officers on the streets. That's in part because of drive times but also out of safety concerns. As a recent Department of Public Safety report noted: "Officers are more cautious about taking runs and often delay response until they have adequate backup, in order to not jeopardize their own safety."

Still, the consensus on the need to hire more police doesn't make the question of how to pay for them any easier to answer. Mayor Greg Ballard and Democrats who control the City-County Council are now locked in tense negotiations on where the money should come from to enroll a 2014 recruit class of 50 to 80 new officers.

Without wading into details of the competing plans, the overriding fiscal principle, one Ballard has stressed, needs to be sustainability. It does the city little good in the long run to use one-time sources of money to pay for the annual expense of putting more police on the streets.

Missing from the current budget discussions is a long-term strategy of how to adequately staff the police department. The focus year after year has been almost exclusively on how to balance the next year's budget. Even this year's proposals would not go far beyond maintaining the status quo once attrition is factored in.

Can we even think about adding 600 or more officers to IMPD? It's not realistic now, of course, but the city will never be in a position to change that without a bipartisan, long-range plan for how to meet growing public safety needs. The real questions: Could the city reach, or exceed, the national average for police staffing in the next decade? And who will step forward to lead the planning for that goal?

The city's current budget squabbles, although important, are focused on small gains. The long-term challenge of deploying enough officers to truly meet public safety needs has yet to be addressed.

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

Email this article

Editorial: Indy needs long-term strategy for hiring more police

On the complex, politically charged issue of how to confront violent crime in Indianapolis, there is finally consensus on one important point: The city's police department is dramatically